PS Audio FR30 speakers

[CtheArgie]

"Too often, musicians have to absorb the costs of production, leaving them little or any earnings – or even putting them in debt. And the quality of their recordings end up in last place. We at PS Audio® and Octave Records are dedicated to correcting these inequities. To support musicians, Octave covers 100% of all studio, mixing, mastering, production, distribution, and marketing expenses so that artists may directly share in retail sales revenues – while retaining ownership of their music".

Ref. : PSAudio.com

This statement is a bit disingenuous. If PS Audio covers all these expenses, are they also the ones determining or making the decisions for those expenses?

Also, if you take this "offer", does it then mean that you must use the recording tools and techniques from Octave?

The other day I was listening to the Beach Boys. Then I put the Dark Side of the Moon recording. These two records, for example, would be impossible to make using Octave's preferred recording techniques.

This is why I believe that Octave is just a sliver of a tiny segment of the recording population.

By the way, all those Octave expenses are already charged to P&L or maybe can be considered as R&D or even marketing expenses for the PS A line. I don't challenge that, I only state that companies have choices on how to market their products.

 

[Cars-N-Cans]

I don't hate Klippel, you can't rationally hate something you don't know.

I first became interested in audio when measurements were very important and we chose audio by measurements. It was also a time when photography was largely manual and you had to know about aperture, focal planes etc. Now you just point your phone and that's it. Audio is pretty much point-and-click these days as well. I do a lot of manual photography, and going back to audio measurements is a bit going back to manual photography, which is why I'm curious about the usefulness of measurements when most things measure well enough. Scepticism arises because I have used power products that I know make things sound better, but ASR has never recommended a single power product. Looking beyond ASR, I just can't see people using measurements for speakers. I've only barely heard of Genelec and Neumann, Genelec only because of a social contact, because these brands are not sold in the consumer market. I've never seen or heard a Revel speaker because none of the dealers I visit stock them. The impression I get is that most people outside ASR look to measurements to find real dogs and discount them, but they are few and far apart.

It’s worth mentioning that having powerful and convenient tools is no replacement for competence. We still need competent designers and unlike photography and point and click for convenience, todays tools are a necessity to be able to address all the complexities of acoustic design. I have seen that in my past experience. Engineer takes all the test data with the fancy equipment, compiles the reports using the data analysis tools, and makes a product that costs the company millions when it suffers latent failures in the field in a critical application. Look back through the design and test documentation and it’s clear to see where the problems were due to there being no insight into what the results showed. There is also a difference between measuring well enough and measuring good. The further off target the speaker is, the more issues it can present. Subjectively this may or may not be ok with you. If you want it to sound correct than a speaker that has had its on axis response tweaked to fill in off-axis issues won’t sound the way you want, and will be harder to set up.

Also speakers of old were very deficient compared to today due to the lack of tools available. Typically a slide rule, anechoic chamber with basic analog measuring system, and analytical mathematical models could only get you so far. This shows in older speakers that are reasonably neutral, but have terrible resonances and other issues with their drivers, and these where rare. More commonly there were going to be issues no matter what, so the measurement was there to allow you to see if there was any reasonable chance of it being good. There are just too many moving parts to be tractable without sophisticated simulation and measurement tools. There is also the enormous benefit in insight afforded by the ability to simulate things. It’s not a substitute for reality, but it gives you enough to be informed about the subtleties, and this doesn’t even touch on the difference in knowledge we have now. A good, competent designer 40 years ago could design you a good speaker. That same designer now with modern methods can go beyond giving you a great speaker. They can give you one that can perform close to the theoretical limits of what’s possible.

 

[617]

It’s worth mentioning that having powerful and convenient tools is no replacement for competence. We still need competent designers and unlike photography and point and click for convenience, todays tools are a necessity to be able to address all the complexities of acoustic design. I have seen that in my past experience. Engineer takes all the test data with the fancy equipment, compiles the reports using the data analysis tools, and makes a product that costs the company millions when it suffers latent failures in the field in a critical application. Look back through the design and test documentation and it’s clear to see where the problems were due to there being no insight into what the results showed. There is also a difference between measuring well enough and measuring good. The further off target the speaker is, the more issues it can present. Subjectively this may or may not be ok with you. If you want it to sound correct than a speaker that has had its on axis response tweaked to fill in off-axis issues won’t sound the way you want, and will be harder to set up.

Also speakers of old were very deficient compared to today due to the lack of tools available. Typically a slide rule, anechoic chamber with basic analog measuring system, and analytical mathematical models could only get you so far. This shows in older speakers that are reasonably neutral, but have terrible resonances and other issues with their drivers, and these where rare. More commonly there were going to be issues no matter what, so the measurement was there to allow you to see if there was any reasonable chance of it being good. There are just too many moving parts to be tractable without sophisticated simulation and measurement tools. There is also the enormous benefit in insight afforded by the ability to simulate things. It’s not a substitute for reality, but it gives you enough to be informed about the subtleties, and this doesn’t even touch on the difference in knowledge we have now. A good, competent designer 40 years ago could design you a good speaker. That same designer now with modern methods can go beyond giving you a great speaker. They can give you one that can perform close to the theoretical limits of what’s possible.

Not only is technology not a substitute for competence, it also is not a substitute for expression. To someone like me, who has designed a lot of speakers and scrutinized the design choices of hundreds if not thousands of others, the advent of advanced measurement technology (and metrics which describe listener preference) do not remove the designer and the centrality of his vision, they merely adjust the domain he is working in.

To use your analogy with photography, at the beginning of photographic history, simply getting any exposure required enormous expertise, and in many cases, so called 'fine art' photographers created images which were frankly dull, and relied on the technology of photography itself for impact. Nowadays the technology of photography has advanced to the point where almost anyone can create hyper real images in any light at very little cost, but this doesn't mean photography is dead; it just means that you have to focus on what's actually important - an image which accomplishes some kind of human goal. Were people making better images when they had to load film in a black bag? Some of them were, and they were making a lot fewer images, but at the same time, the quality of an average mom-recipe blog photograph of some overnight oats in a mason jar is better than the photographs I have in any cookbook from the 80s, both in terms of technical quality and also expression.

In loudspeaker design, we are not constrained by a device which exactly characterizes the sound of a speaker, or a metric which gives us an idea of what most consumers like. Rather, these tools allow us to precisely deviate from these standards in ways which we have to justify according to our own vision or hypothesis about what sounds good. Most speaker designers, however, see speaker design as a mere technical exercise, and to them, it makes speakers a mere consumer good - but others have greater vision. A good example is Siegfried Linkwitz, who pursued speaker design out of a sincere and personal vision of acoustic performance in his home. Frankly I have become completely bored with speaker designers with no vision other than 'I have a personal understanding of science and I think this sounds good'. That's basically the ethic of hifi - people hypothesizing about what technical qualities matter and 90% of them being wrong about them. 'Time alignment'. Ultralight mylar diaphragms for 'speed'. Bass 'Q'. Harmonic distortion. Crossover symmetry, the supremacy of active vs passive, vs dsp, sand filled cabinets. Very little science, a lot of solitary garage engineering, and almost no art.

There is so much room for innovation in speakers. Why two channel hifi? Why expensive? Why boxes? Why only selling to men? Why sell to people who listen to Dire Straits and Pink Floyd instead of 78s, or podcasts, or Frank Ocean, or ambient techno, or bird sounds? Why do we put them in living rooms, instead of community spaces? Why do we design them to reproduce all music, instead of specific music? Why do we expect consumers to simply look at them, instead of interacting with them, or adjusing them, or looking at them? People traditionally dance to music, why do the speakers stand still?

What our technology and metrics have done is made the production of boring speakers easier and encouraged standardization, which in theory should improve recordings. Yes, the guy putting expensive scandinavian drivers into big boxes with fancy wood veneer coffins might find that threatening, but frankly he should just lean into using fancier drivers and fancier woodworking. Sonus Faber and Chario make boring speakers from a technical perspective (Chario uses cool tweeters I guess) but I would never tell someone they 'wasted their money' on something beautiful. Look at Oswald Mill.

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

Computer aided design doesn't necesarily mean previous designs were inferior. Computers mainly allow the same results in a much shorter time frame. A competent designer is still required. Manufacturing methods have made significant advances; machining can be done to closer tolerances more easily and more cheaply than in the past.

 

[Cars-N-Cans]

What our technology and metrics have done is made the production of boring speakers easier and encouraged standardization, which in theory should improve recordings. Yes, the guy putting expensive scandinavian drivers into big boxes with fancy wood veneer coffins might find that threatening, but frankly he should just lean into using fancier drivers and fancier woodworking. Sonus Faber and Chario make boring speakers from a technical perspective (Chario uses cool tweeters I guess) but I would never tell someone they 'wasted their money' on something beautiful. Look at Oswald Mill.

We need to factor in that we do not yet have metrics for how to make speakers accurately convey spatial imaging, and even in two-channel reproduction, speakers will not reflect what's actually in the recording insofar as spatial cues. If there is something, its probably kept fairly proprietary. Some setups probably manage to do a good job of spaciousness and conveying a large portion of the interaural intensity differences, but the interaural timing differences as well as the relationships in the time domain between the direct and first portion of the indirect sound will be quite skewed to what we are used to in real life. On top of this, we are taking physical things like instruments and vocalists which have complex radiation patterns and trying to funnel them through a pair of transducers that will convey the spectral information, but with fairly constant and predefined patterns of radiation that will not match what we would otherwise hear. There are things like cross-talk cancellation and RFZ that "sort of" address this, wave front synthesis, and parametric systems like Dolby Atmos that seek to provide some form spatial information via the channels to satisfy the the auditory centers own need to locate things. And to touch on your topic of being overly analytical, as audiophiles would say, I did not really care for Sennheiser's Ambeo recordings. The Neumann dummy head is a technological marvel that does a good job of making the soundstage accurate with respect to width, but the sound localization is still slightly behind as it would be with standard recordings in headphones due to the more subtle cues mismatching those from my own ears. Another issue is the "as-is" sound very much gives a "liminal space feel" of being in a venue with no people around, which is antithetical to why I go to a live performance to begin with. Not my cup of tea. It really makes me appreciate what the art of mixing brings to a recording and its an interesting philosophical debate as to what the right balance should be.

With that in mind, though, there is room for artistic interpretation to provide something in the place of what we would experience in reality that can provide a similar subjective experience. I have yet to hear a speaker that is not neutral tonally that I don't have some misgiving about though. Its mainly down to the radiation pattern and what can be done with the speaker that are differentiators for me.

 

[YSC]

We need to factor in that we do not yet have metrics for how to make speakers accurately convey spatial imaging, and even in two-channel reproduction, speakers will not reflect what's actually in the recording insofar as spatial cues. If there is something, its probably kept fairly proprietary. Some setups probably manage to do a good job of spaciousness and conveying a large portion of the interaural intensity differences, but the interaural timing differences as well as the relationships in the time domain between the direct and first portion of the indirect sound will be quite skewed to what we are used to in real life. On top of this, we are taking physical things like instruments and vocalists which have complex radiation patterns and trying to funnel them through a pair of transducers that will convey the spectral information, but with fairly constant and predefined patterns of radiation that will not match what we would otherwise hear. There are things like cross-talk cancellation and RFZ that "sort of" address this, wave front synthesis, and parametric systems like Dolby Atmos that seek to provide some form spatial information via the channels to satisfy the the auditory centers own need to locate things. And to touch on your topic of being overly analytical, as audiophiles would say, I did not really care for Sennheiser's Ambeo recordings. The Neumann dummy head is a technological marvel that does a good job of making the soundstage accurate with respect to width, but the sound localization is still slightly behind as it would be with standard recordings in headphones due to the more subtle cues mismatching those from my own ears. Another issue is the "as-is" sound very much gives a "liminal space feel" of being in a venue with no people around, which is antithetical to why I go to a live performance to begin with. Not my cup of tea. It really makes me appreciate what the art of mixing brings to a recording and its an interesting philosophical debate as to what the right balance should be.

With that in mind, though, there is room for artistic interpretation to provide something in the place of what we would experience in reality that can provide a similar subjective experience. I have yet to hear a speaker that is not neutral tonally that I don't have some misgiving about though. Its mainly down to the radiation pattern and what can be done with the speaker that are differentiators for me.

I do believe it's the reflections creating the spaceousness, we hear spatial clues from the minute delay of reflected sounds to direct sound, as if how we percieve sound coming from left or right, front or rear from the delay between left and right ears. put that aside as individual room varies a ton in any home, the basic matric (anechoic flat response) should be done as close as possible, after that the spacial behaviour as in dispersion could be chosen by personal preference. One thing I noticed in the Octave studio is that while Chris have discussed here that the FR 30 is to opt for a flat listening window response and not direct on axis response, it seems that in Octave they did toe the FR30 to the mixer... so... anyway

 

[Cars-N-Cans]

I do believe it's the reflections creating the spaceousness, we hear spatial clues from the minute delay of reflected sounds to direct sound, as if how we percieve sound coming from left or right, front or rear from the delay between left and right ears. put that aside as individual room varies a ton in any home, the basic matric (anechoic flat response) should be done as close as possible, after that the spacial behaviour as in dispersion could be chosen by personal preference. One thing I noticed in the Octave studio is that while Chris have discussed here that the FR 30 is to opt for a flat listening window response and not direct on axis response, it seems that in Octave they did toe the FR30 to the mixer... so... anyway

I do agree completely since at the speaker level its just a transducer, so there's not much you can do there other than just have standard metrics such as the frequency response, dispersion pattern and listening window. The rest is up to the room, any added DSP processing, etc. to get what you want out of it. With that said, there are some interesting exceptions like the mbls that solve the off-axis issue simply by making all the axis on-axis when you think about it, for better or worse. Def. a system I would like to hear at some point.

Edit: Even if I don't think objectively its entirely proper to try and add artificial aspects to the sound, experimentation doesn't hurt. But then it heads down the slippery slope of subjective preference.

 

[617]

I do believe it's the reflections creating the spaceousness, we hear spatial clues from the minute delay of reflected sounds to direct sound, as if how we percieve sound coming from left or right, front or rear from the delay between left and right ears. put that aside as individual room varies a ton in any home, the basic matric (anechoic flat response) should be done as close as possible, after that the spacial behaviour as in dispersion could be chosen by personal preference. One thing I noticed in the Octave studio is that while Chris have discussed here that the FR 30 is to opt for a flat listening window response and not direct on axis response, it seems that in Octave they did toe the FR30 to the mixer... so... anyway

I agree and I think the rendering of spaciousness is one of the choices a speaker designer should make.

Wide or narrow dispersion. On one end of the extreme you have dipoles or even omnis, on the other hand you have cardioids and intense horns.

What these speakers have in common is that they can all achieve the same tonality in terms of bass and treble balance, they can all have a smooth axial frequency response, perhaps less so with certain horns, and they can all have a smooth DI curve.

What are the two flagship Harman speakers? One is a wide dispersion hifi speaker with a tiny midrange and then a bigger one. The other is a huge waveguidentwo way. Both have textbook DI and FR, both have great bass, and they sound totally different.

 

[Cars-N-Cans]

I agree and I think the rendering of spaciousness is one of the choices a speaker designer should make.

Wide or narrow dispersion. On one end of the extreme you have dipoles or even omnis, on the other hand you have cardioids and intense horns.

What these speakers have in common is that they can all achieve the same tonality in terms of bass and treble balance, they can all have a smooth axial frequency response, perhaps less so with certain horns, and they can all have a smooth DI curve.

What are the two flagship Harman speakers? One is a wide dispersion hifi speaker with a tiny midrange and then a bigger one. The other is a huge waveguidentwo way. Both have textbook DI and FR, both have great bass, and they sound totally different.

My understanding is that one thing the wide dispersion with controlled directivity achieves is to largely eliminate the IIDs from the speaker itself since both ears get roughly the same SPL level from the tweeter, leaving only the ITDs which introduces a cone of confusion. I think this is the “halo” of sound you hear when doing controlled listening with one speaker. Im sure there is quite a bit more even without considering the room interactions, but definitely the imaging will differ. I would surmise that the narrower directivity of the horn can introduce substantial gradients in SPL level between each ear, depending on where you are relative to the speakers axis.

 

[Chris Brunhaver]

The messaging is unarguably a mess, and Chris hasn't really made things a whole lot clearer. He might well be constrained in what he can say, but if it were me, I'd not say anything at all if I couldn't be forthright and detailed.

I understand that some more advanced hobbyists and people don't appreciate Paul's videos but a lot of people do. I think that building community is challenging and different people have different ideas on it. I think that Amir is doing a good job here building a good community.

I'm not really sure what you mean about the messaging on the speaker. In addition to the details on our website. I described our engineering and measurement process here and future plans regarding publishing more data.

One of the challenges that I have with our lab is that they mainly test pro audio speakers and need some screw in mount points on the speaker, so I'm currently working out a solution for that (though future models will have some unpainted cabinets, which can be "sacrificial')

 

[Chris Brunhaver]

Its certainly cheaper over the long run than building a boutique recording studio in the middle of nowhere artistically speaking in order to record what amounts to Muzak. And not even well recorded Muzak at that.

I'm happy to setup an online petition or GoFundMe for a Klippel NFS, since people feel so strongly about it . Feel free to add Comsol Multiphysics to the list too.

Even prior to the positive review, we have taken deposits on millions of dollars of FR30 (many more that I was personally expecting) and will be fulfilling the first mass production batch of those this month. Previous units were a small pro production pilot run.

Eventually, I hope to get some more cool tools for engineering but have done the most with the FEA, measurement and lab resources that we have available.

The studio is a passion project for Paul and something that he and Terri have wanted to do for many years. I hope that it succeeds for him but I don't have anything to do with it and can't comment further.

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

I'm happy to setup an online petition or GoFundMe for a Klippel NFS, since people feel so strongly about it . Feel free to add Comsol Multiphysics to the list too.

Even prior to the positive review, we have taken deposits on millions of dollars of FR30 (many more that I was personally expecting) and will be fulfilling the first mass production batch of those this month. Previous units were a small pro production pilot run.

Eventually, I hope to get some more cool tools for engineering but have done the most with the FEA, measurement and lab resources that we have available.

The studio is a passion project for Paul and something that he and Terri have wanted to do for many years. I hope that it succeeds for him but I don't have anything to do with it and can't comment further.

With some of the millions in deposits a fraction of that for a Klippel should be peanuts.

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

I'm not really sure what you mean about the messaging on the speaker. In addition to the details on our website. I described our engineering and measurement process here and future plans regarding publishing more data.

If it were me, I wouldn't even post a thing about the speaker here until I had all those measurements which I could use to support what I would be saying. Saying 'in the future' just leaves you open to a lot of internet nonsense. I might consider opening up a discussion on some of the products I am designing but not until I have a boatload of data to answer the inevitable questions which would arise.

 

[Cars-N-Cans]

If it were me, I wouldn't even post a thing about the speaker here until I had all those measurements which I could use to support what I would be saying. Saying 'in the future' just leaves you open to a lot of internet nonsense. I might consider opening up a discussion on some of the products I am designing but not until I have a boatload of data to answer the inevitable questions which would arise.

As someone who has been in the same position (and on the flip side just as guilty of rabble-rousing), I can definitely relate. Having to give an extensive technical presentation in front of nuclear and particle physicists at work who are luminaries in the field with extensive publication and research credentials, the data better be hermetic or there won’t be enough Nomex in the world to protect you. Just seems an inevitable consequence of dealing with technically inclined people all with their own viewpoint and (often strong) opinions on something.

On top of this there is the aspect that Paul has been in the industry for many years now, and there probably is the thought that he won’t be here forever so he wants to see his vision of PS Audio finally brought to fruition, and is probably not too overly concerned with optics on the other side of the audio isle.

 

[Chris Brunhaver]

If it were me, I wouldn't even post a thing about the speaker here until I had all those measurements which I could use to support what I would be saying. Saying 'in the future' just leaves you open to a lot of internet nonsense. I might consider opening up a discussion on some of the products I am designing but not until I have a boatload of data to answer the inevitable questions which would arise.

Well, I do that that providing detailed measurements is a good thing but it's certainly the exception and not the rule in the high end hifi market and not a prerequisite for most customers who are most concerned with listening/demos, aesthetics, and other factors.

The HifiNews review also corroborated our impedance spec, sensitivity, bass extension etc., so I think that what we're claiming has been supported pretty well thus far.

I intended to off polar measurements more concurrently with the launch of the speaker but am a few months behind isn't too bad and we should be concurrent with future models.

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

Well, I do that that providing detailed measurements is a good thing but it's certainly the exception and not the rule in the high end hifi market and not a prerequisite for most customers who are most concerned with listening/demos, aesthetics, and other factors.

For better or worse, it's an unwritten expectation on a forum called Audio Science Review to be, as the Boy Scouts say "prepared". Think of it as akin to presenting to the Audio Engineering Society.

Presenting at some local audiophile meeting, sure, flowery prose, promises and technobabble are fine (unless I happen to be in the audience ).

I've said it before and I mean it; I'm sure your speaker is just fine and will sound wonderful. But this is the internet after all......

 

[Voo]

if they score or get reviewed as better than focal sopra speakers....imo they worth an audition

 

[Cars-N-Cans]

I understand that some more advanced hobbyists and people don't appreciate Paul's videos but a lot of people do. I think that building community is challenging and different people have different ideas on it. I think that Amir is doing a good job here building a good community.

I like Pauls videos Even if I think they are a bit light on the technical side of things, it’s still interesting to hear what he has to say. I subbed early on in the series, and needless to say his opinions were quite eyebrow raising at first, to put it mildly. Definitely requires context to see where he is coming from.

 

[amirm]

If it were me, I wouldn't even post a thing about the speaker here until I had all those measurements which I could use to support what I would be saying.

I hear what you are saying but personally, I smile every time I see Chris post something. It shows that the unexpected can happen. That a company like PS Audio did not block him from doing so. And he can share with us other insight that we would not know otherwise.

 

[CtheArgie]

Oh, I give Chris a lot of credit! I believe he is honestly trying. He is not the issue in my mind. Though his comment of purchasing envy or only suggesting subjective reviews was not really the best of him.

If you think of it, his "passive endorsement" of Octave is really very honest.